Community Belonging
Feelings of belonging with others/community have strong positive effects on wellbeing. They improve personal perspectives on life’s circumstances and substantially reduce risk of mental and physical health issues and premature death.
Lack of feelings of belonging take the form of experiences of loneliness and/or unwanted social isolation. Loneliness can be alleviated by creation of meaningful (deep, purposeful) connections with others/community. Unwanted social isolation can be addressed by functional connections based on support to deal with involuntary disconnection from community (social exclusion or avoidance of harm), and risk and fear of adverse consequences of disconnection for comfort, health, safety, and survival.
Experiences of loneliness and/or unwanted social isolation are widespread. Often, adversely affected individuals are unable to overcome these experiences themselves. They need help. This challenge has attracted increasing attention from researchers, government agencies, and caring sector entities in Australia and other countries. In May 2025, the World Health Assembly, comprising representatives of member states of the World Health Organisation, formally recognised social connection as an urgent public health priority, and urged governments to implement evidence-based programmes to advance social connections to address loneliness and unwanted social isolation.
Creating connections requires the participation of other people. The St John’s Cathedral community wants to help and is working on ways of doing so, as explained on sub-pages of this website.